If Venus of Willendorf were a paper doll

I have joined another Swap-bot swap, this time, a paperdoll with the theme Earth!  Immediately, I thought of Venus of Willendorf (see inset.)  She epitomizes Earth for me, but then I thought what would she look if she were modern? 
She is made of hand-made paper painted with copper paint which should develop a nice patina over time.  I then added details with gel pens and acrylic paint. 
As I was designing this doll I began to reminisce about my mom.  Every year when I was a little girl and the Ms Universe pageant was on TV my mom would paint our nails and we would wear our best dresses.  She also made my sister and I voluptuous paperdolls on cardboard and designed them dresses from flocked wallpaper.  The dresses were gold, ruby red and sapphire blue.  I decided that in honor of my mom, I would give my earth mama seasonal outfits.  All of the outfits are made from commerical scrapbooking papers with additional details, like the faux fur trim on the winter snowsuit or the lace on the summer frock.

Another Tree; Tree of Life ATC

I just love creating art with trees as my focus. They are so figurative. The picture above is ink and colored pencil Tree of Life ATC for a swap on swap-bot. As I was working on the theme, I easily came up with a dozen ideas....my next theme for a series of art quilts? Hmmm.

Per usual I retain all rights to my images on this blog, copyright Penney Hughes

Children's ATC Swap

My older son recently noticed my Artist Trading Card collection and thought they were neat. He asked if he could make a couple. These are the designs we came up with; the upper left card is my younger son's "The Space Alien A", upper right is my older son's "Falling Ball" and the bottom card was designed by me, "The Trip." Artist Trading Cards are little baseball (or Pokemon) card sized artworks that are created to be given away or exchanged with others. Many cards are made of collaged items or stamped but I have cards of almost every media that can be put on some kind of paper. If you are collaging materials, I suggest recylcling some of your more interesting looking junk mail. Mirkwood Designs has a really great ATC template to print out onto cardstock to get you started.

The kids were excited to trade their cards and see what came back in the mail. I am a member of Swap-bot, so I logged on to my account and have set up a swap for the kids. Please feel free to join our Kids ATC swap. The account is free and they have many fun activities to participate in.